Contents

Introduction

Sawfish is a highly customizable window manager. Formerly it has been the standard Window manager of the GNOME desktop, but because of a change of maintainership this is no longer true. This article will show you how to install and configure it for standalone use (w/o GNOME).

Installation

Install from AUR:

# yaourt -S sawfish

Starting Sawfish

If you use startx, just put

exec sawfish

at the end of your ~/.xinitrc. For other cases, see ... ?

Customization

Out-of-the box Sawfish provides a menu accessible by clicking Mouse-2 (middle button) on the root window. From there, you can launch the customization app.

If you change any settings, they are stored in ~/.sawfish/custom.

Themes

You can select a window theme from the customization app. There is a small bug: if the theme is parametrizable, its configuration window will only appear after you restart the customization app.

Adding new

Create the directory ~/.sawfish/themes/ and drop there any theme files. You do not need to uncompress them. There are 500+ themes to choose from in the Sawfish site.

Menus

Arch doesn't provide an automatic menu generator for Sawfish, but you can generate the menus using the XFCE4 ones. Here are the necessary steps:

1. Create the directory ~/.sawfish/lisp/. This is where custom Sawfish scripts are stored; the menu will be one of them.

5. Now you have a script ~/.sawfish/lisp/arch-menu.jl that defines a variable arch-menu with a list of your applications. You need to link to it from the root menu. You need to write the code for that to happen in ~/.sawfishrc. So, start your favorite editor, create ~/.sawfishrc, and type: